SURRENDER, DOROTHY!!!

On Sunday, September 25, we attended a program at American University’s Kay Chapel, held in conjunction with the No War 2016: Real Security Without Terrorism conference. The event, the 14th annual Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence (surely a misprint), went to John to Kiriakou. He received a candle and candlestick holder for shining his light into dark corners of knowledge. Kiriakou, best known for being jailed after confirming that the United States used torture as an instrument of foreign policy, recently completed 30 months in prison for telling a known truth. Most intelligence officers do that only after they are retired and drawing fat pensions.Preface The speakers were somewhat surreal, in keeping with an earlier event of about 15 rather elderly people, one of whom used a walker. The group had been planning its arrest at the Pentagon in an upcoming action protesting war. They were meeting an unknown number of people, sans banners and attorneys, at the end of a bus line. Those talking at the Sam Adams ceremony included equally odd individuals such as Lawrence B. “Larry” Wilkerson (Col., USA, retired), former chief of staff to former General/Sectary of State Colin Powell and a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy; Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst who later moved to the State Department’s Office of Counter-Terrorism; and Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer who spent twenty years overseas in Europe and the Middle East working terrorism cases. During our research for the publication Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World, we had contacted the foregoing gentlemen about research for the book. All professed absolutely no knowledge of American government involvement in recruiting, training, and supporting terrorists (despite numerous articles even in the administration’s house organ, The Washington Post). After the awards ceremony, we had the opportunity to brace Wilkerson and Johnson, handing each our business card showing Visas for Al Qaeda and its website. In summarizing the book, we noted, in our conversations, that each had previously told us that they knew nothing about the work’s concept, and that the book’s theme was alien to them. Again, after being told this, mirabile dictu, they repeated their prior remarks, saying that they knew naught of the subject.THE PROGRAMElizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East (and CIA analyst) organized the event. All the speakers bashed the United States of America for engaging in murder, war crimes, and human rights violations around the world while attacking those few who dared question such actions. Nearly all forcefully noted that American civil liberties, once guaranteed by the Constitution, have been severely eroded, if not abolished by the “War on Terror”. The mostly grey-haired audience cheered lustily and gave the honoree, John Kiriakou, a standing ovation.Ray McGovern Ray McGovern, a retired CIA official turned activist and member of the tightly-knit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), led off by praising former president John F. Kennedy’s arms control speech at American University. He noted that Ann Wright, former Colonel, USA, was on the Women’s Boat to Gaza, in an effort to oppose the blockade against the Palestinian people of Gaza. This brought great applause.Continuing, McGovern added that many previous Adams awardees had been jailed or exiled. These included, he said, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. Additionally, he told the audience that the first award, delivered at “an undisclosed location”, had gone to Coleen Rowley, at the time an FBI Special Agent. (She had written a 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller accusing FBI headquarters of hampering the investigation into the alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui. She said officials at FBI headquarters had resisted seeking search warrants and admonished agents who sought help from the CIA.) Commenting on the current state of affairs, McGovern said that they had intended to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta in 2015, but that the American government had preempted them with the 2013 passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDA). According to McGovern, that Act had stripped U.S. citizens of their civil liberties, replacing them with only those rights which the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces allows. Introducing the next speaker, Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, McGovern asserted that Murray had said he would rather die than see someone tortured.Craig Murray The former ambassador, an earlier Adams awardee, had lost his position because of his reporting on torture, inter alia alerting Tony Blair, British prime minister and American president George W. Bush, that U.K. and U.S. counter-terrorist allies in Uzbekistan were boiling dissidents alive. Murray, to whom the U.S. State Department had denied a visa waiver, observed that people who question intelligence findings are often severely punished while those who “go with the flow” are rewarded and advance their careers. He also remarked that the press does not tell the truth, using, as an example, a Guardian story about Julian Assange being “mostly lies”. As part of the reason for his sacking, the former ambassador opined that the British government had charged him with 18 counts of trading visas for sex and driving a Land Rover down an internal staircase. In later remarks, Ambassador Murray had said that 16,000 people had signed a petition to get him a visa and, upon his arrival in the U.S., to his great surprise, he had been whisked through the airport, despite his repeatedly saying “No” to U.S. government policy. Offering more opinions on American actions, he characterized former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski USA as another truth-teller about the Abu Ghraib military prison, noting that her career had essentially ended when George W. Bush had her charged with shoplifting. He added that Bush had reduced her in rank to colonel after reports surfaced that she, as commander at Abu Ghraib, had followed orders allowing prisoner torture. Additionally, the former ambassador asserted that no one in charge of any department in the U.K. government had been opposed to the war against Iraq. He did comment that, yes, it’s an awful situation today but there are people still out there who are beginning to question governmental actions. [Afterwards, we asked Murray how he eventually got his visa, but he had no answer for us. He did observe that it would have been something to see him driving a Land Rover down a flight of stairs inside the embassy building. Given his problems in getting to the United States, Murray wondered if he would have difficulty re-entering the United Kingdom following his U.S. visit.]Thomas Drake Drake had been a former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) who had questioned illegal activities, waste and mismanagement there. Consequently, the government targeted him for prosecution. Observing that September 11, 2001 was his first day on the job at the NSA, he added that, following that date, “the wheels came off our form of government”. He said that that administration had transformed itself into one for which he had not sworn an oath to protect and defend. In fact, he added, he is now opposed to this sort of rule. Continuing, he opined that, after September 11, former vice president Dick Cheney had “gone over to the Dark Side” and that Cofer Black, former CIA official and State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, had said “the gloves are coming off”. This resulted, Drake commented, in secret orders as well as presidential “findings” and directives for mass surveillance and torture. Drake added that the CIA had offered John Kiriakou torture training but that he had refused it. Touching on how adherence to the law blights careers, Drake said that those who organized and operated these illegal, unconstitutional agendas were protected and promoted. However, he noted that Kiriakou who revealed those programs, had been severely prosecuted. Essentially, Drake commented, a state that cannot expose war crimes becomes a criminal entity itself. The former government executive added that the NSA’s new Utah facility could listen to all American citizens’ telephone calls for the next 500 years. (He didn’t say a word about the U.S. government’s inability or unwillingness to find and prosecute the people who violate the Federal Communications Commission’s “Do Not Call List”. Nor did he touch on the possibility that the NSA itself is the originator of these calls.)Lawrence B. Wilkerson Opening his remarks, former colonel Wilkerson alleged a split between President Barack H. Obama (D-Ill.) and the armed forces, claiming that the military was more militant than the president in seeking to deal with Syria (a point diametrically opposed to the substantive evidence set forth in Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World). Wilkerson commented that American policy in Southwest Asia was a disaster. He observed that there was a displaced Iraqi family in every Jordanian home. Furthermore, he said, Syrian refugees are now knocking on doors of private houses in the Hashemite Kingdom. Noting that 53% of the U.S. people support torture, especially when it is presented as a necessity, Wilkerson stated that this concept had been explicitly ruled out when the U.S. government ratified the UN Convention Against Torture. Jumping to those rewarded for wrong decisions or bad decisions, the former colonel observed that those who did so, particularly those who asserted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction, “turned your stomach”.Larry Johnson Beginning with comments about American football, the former CIA and State Department official traced the politicization of intelligence back to the Vietnam war. Then, he said, President Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex.) had wanted to know why those who were reporting on the failure of the war “didn’t get with the program”. Speaker Johnson explained that he and others didn’t come forward about this because they had good jobs and children in college. They felt they had too much to lose by standing up to the government. Johnson suggested that American college students, in preparation for careers in government or who sought to understand reality, should read Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Kurt Vonnegut’s bizarre books, and the works of Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who produced The Trial (about a man forced to defend himself in a hopeless court system against a crime that is never revealed to him or to the reader). The speaker further noted that if you want an account of the real world, don’t look to Washington as a source of information. Finally, Johnson asserted that John Kiriakou initially did not believe that the system was rigged and that people who supported the law would be rewarded.Philip Giraldi (Like Wilkerson and Johnson, we had contacted him while researching our book, but he had professed ignorance of any American government support for terrorism. We did not reach him for comment after the program.) According to Giraldi, the CIA’s motto is “we do what you want”. He added that the Agency is an illegal organization that steals and kills. Furthermore, its members do not worry because what they do is good for their careers. In fact, he said, some CIA staff never understand what is going on. Their view, he opined, is “we’re the good guys.” Giraldi told the group that his personal breaking point had come when agents he had recruited in Asia were executed by their government because of a Washington, D.C. mistake.Elizabeth Murray The “other” Murray, a former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council and a retired CIA political analyst, spoke for a few minutes. The organizer of the event, Murray commented that the CIA had also fired Kiriakou’s wife, Heather, presumably because of guilt by association. She added that we are all civil servants and under an obligation to tell the truth to the American people. Unsurprisingly, Murray criticized Barack H. Obama (D-Ill.) for his attacks on truth-tellers. The ceremony concluded with the award of the candle and candlestick to John Kiriakou, with an expression of praise for Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who, it was claimed, had supported the former CIA official. (The group did not mention Feinstein’s backing the “wrist slap” punishment for retired Army general David Petraeus who had leaked highly-classified material to his mistress. The group also omitted any discussion of Feinstein’s support for the “no fly, no buy” list, where anyone secretly prevented from flying by a Terrorist Screening Center could not buy firearms. “Due Process” is evidently not a right guaranteed by Feinstein’s version of the Constitution.)